Accessibility solutions for houses of worship

Accessibility for houses of worship means ensuring that religious services, events, video, podcasts, and other media shared are usable by everyone – including people with disabilities, such as those who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or low vision, or who benefit from written or translated content. It involves remediating your existing content by adding tools like captions, transcripts and audio description to them and providing it for live content as it happens in real-time to ensure the experience is equitable to everyone watching or participating. Here is a helpful blog with a checklist on accessibility for houses of worship.

Many religious organizations seek guidance on ADA compliance for places of worship and accessibility best practices. While legal requirements may vary, accessibility is widely recognized as a best practice for public-facing communication and community engagement. Many religious leaders demonstrate their commitment to inclusive community engagement even without a legal obligation to do so. With advanced AI tools like Verbit Captivate now available, the costs are now significantly less to do so, without sacrificing captioning and transcription quality.

Implementing captioning, transcription, and audio description helps:

• Demonstrate commitment to inclusion and equity

• Align with ADA accessibility principles where applicable

• Reduce barriers for congregants with disabilities

• Create welcoming environments for diverse communities

Yes – transcripts expand accessibility for individuals with disabilities, preserve important messages, and make content easier to reuse and share. Posting transcripts of your sermons or services online can also help potential congregants discover you. Transcripts serve as accessibility tools for churches and faith-based organizations and should be simple to implement and scalable for congregations of all sizes with the right partner. With Verbit’s specialization in religious institutional needs, offering transcription to your church congregants and community members is easy.

Captions make livestreams and in-person services and events easier to follow. Captions help participants in noisy environments with background noise and multiple speakers. They also support congregants with hearing loss and those participating in non-native languages. Captioning your livestreamed events helps ensure worship services are accessible to remote attendees and diverse audiences. Captions have also come to be an expectation by individuals with and without disabilities who enjoy viewing with an extra visual cue. Here’s a customer success story of a partner working with Verbit for live captioning for their religious environment.

Sermon transcripts provide searchable, shareable records of spoken text and religious teachings that can be used for study groups, reflection, staff reference, and outreach beyond the live service. Creating searchable content for websites, newsletters and archives is helpful for your existing congregation, but will also help others discover you with improved SEO.

Common accessibility solutions include worship service captioning, sermon transcription, audio description, and multilingual translation. All of these inclusion tools can be offered with AI or human support and help remove communication barriers and promote inclusion. These technologies as powered by Verbit can be used physically onsite or with livestreamed events and recordings being posted online.

Yes, Verbit provides multilingual support with captions and transcripts being offered in 28+ languages to help churches connect with diverse or international congregations. Our church translation services make it easier to reach non-native speakers or bilingual communities.

Verbit combines advanced AI and its proprietary automated speech recognition technology, Captivate, with professional review to deliver high-accuracy results. Verbit uses domain-training on its AI, so it can prep it with related religious services content for superior performance. This process ensures your message is captured clearly and accurately, which isn’t always the case when using generic or free AI transcription tools.